


the winter long

by sadlikeknives



Category: The Iron Covenant - Ilona Andrews
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21810529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: When the first three straggler Iron Dogs came walking up to the gates of Baile a few weeks after the battle with Nez and the dragon's forces, Elara turned to Hugh and said, "You knew this was going to happen."
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	the winter long

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ourdarkspirits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ourdarkspirits/gifts).



When the first three straggler Iron Dogs came walking up to the gates of Baile a few weeks after the battle with Nez and the dragon's forces, Elara turned to Hugh and said, "You knew this was going to happen." He'd found the Iron Dogs a place to stand, a place to be safe, she realized, and now it was up to the ones who'd been hiding or running to get themselves here.

It came out, somehow, more accusing than she had meant it to, and Hugh's tone was uncompromising when he replied, "I hoped it was going to happen." He turned to her then, and his eyes and his voice were hard as he said, "Don't worry. I doubt there will be many of them." Then, before she could even begin to figure out how to explain she hadn't meant it like that, he strode off to greet them, beaming like she didn't think she'd ever seen him. It made him even better-looking, which was, frankly, both infuriating and unfair.

This she came to understand over the coming months: there had once been nearly three thousand Iron Dogs, and immediately after the battle with Nez and the mrogs, there had been not quite three hundred at Baile, roughly one in ten. Most of the rest were known or assumed to be dead. They had been decimated, except a decimation was, in fact, the opposite of that. Having been decimated would have been immeasurably _better_. Every one who managed to make their way to Baile was one more name off a terrible list, one more comrade pulled back from the abyss. One more death Hugh wasn't responsible for, even as he took back up responsibility for their life.

They came all that winter, some alone, some in small groups. Every now and then there would be a whole squad, or at least most of one, that had managed to stick together, but that was rare. They were all like that, she realized quickly. What had seemed to her to be a cohesive whole, a unified fighting force, was in fact a collection of fragments Hugh had rapidly hammered back together as best he could, trusting she wouldn't know enough to see the cracks, and she couldn't even get indignant about it because he hadn't been wrong, had he?

Every time a new survivor arrived, they were swarmed by Iron Dogs with the same set of questions: my friend was in Ivanova's cohort, my lover was outside Atlanta, my old squadmate, my cousin, do you know what happened to them? They never asked, 'Are they dead?' They asked, 'They're dead, aren't they?' When one lone soldier finally made it to Berry Hill who had been at Roland's headquarters of Jester Park when it all went to hell, she was absolutely mobbed, but only after Hugh and his centurions hauled her into a debrief that lasted for nearly six hours. Answers were rare, and generally when they were to be had, they were bad. Every now and then there would be some joyous reunion, and the whole mood of the Iron Dogs seemed lifted for a few days, but that didn't happen often.

They arrived starving, weary, and cold, every one of them, sometimes injured, wary from being hunted for so long and so far, and the Iron Dogs welcomed with open arms every lonely wolf who found their way home. If Elara sometimes thought on how she was ending up with more soldiers to feed than she'd bargained for, she bit her tongue on it. Trade was up, thanks to the deals Hugh had helped them secure; they could afford to feed a few more mouths even if they couldn't afford to pay them yet, even after the budget for the next year was set with the Iron Dogs taken into account from the start.

That was a problem, and rapidly becoming a bigger one. As Elara had told Hugh during that first negotiation, if his people wanted a beer when they were off duty, they'd have to pay for it, but at the time she had not really considered the fact that people with no money _couldn't_ pay for things, or that people could only be expected to go without simple things like a beer on their day off for so long, even if the Iron Dogs never complained. Hugh kept up the salvage runs when the weather wasn't too bad, but most of that money was sunk into completing the improvements he wanted to make to the castle's defenses, and they were going to have to figure out where to put another wing of barracks come spring, when they knew how many beds to put in it. Until then the Iron Dogs were doubling up and squeezing in wherever there was space.

One day in the middle of a bitter February, another clump of Iron Dogs staggered into Baile--six in this one, one of the larger groups. One of them had a nasty cough that turned out to be, to absolutely no one's surprise, pneumonia, and on top of that, thanks to some condition of his own innate magic he was thoroughly resistant to all forms of magical treatment, including Hugh's. Granted, Hugh's magic was far better suited to injuries than illness, but given the sheer amount of it he had to throw around, he generally could do _something_. Stoyan had been dispatched to Lexington to pick up antibiotics that had been manufactured by purely mundane means from a hospital there (at a truly extortionate price, but there was nothing to be done about that), but in the meantime they were reduced to treating the symptoms as best they could, and Hugh's helplessness in the situation was driving him mad.

Elara found him one day shortly after their arrival while he was leaving the barracks, and asked immediately, "How is Mr. Foster today?"

"Holding his own," Hugh said, brisk and impersonal, a medic giving his report. "It would help if he had any resources in reserve to speak of, of course."

"Of course," Elara agreed. This particular batch of Dogs had come up from the ley point in Aberdine in the back of someone's farm wagon. She kept meaning to find out which particular farmer and send them some kind of thank you, because she remembered when her people had been cold and hungry and sick, and she kept thinking about Jake Foster walking those last ten miles, if he'd had to, as he'd walked who knew how many more already.

Hugh went possibly even more serious then and said, "I need to speak to you about something."

"Of course," she agreed again. "Only, can it wait until I find out what's got Johanna in a tizzy?"

"Yes, certainly," Hugh agreed. "Johanna in a tizzy sounds far more pressing."

"I'll find you," she said, and a few hours later, when she'd finally gotten that crisis sorted, she went to do so, finally tracking him down in the stables, grooming his horse. Elara snuck Bucky a sugar lump she'd brought from the kitchens and asked the question that had been following her for months: "Why does he glow?"

Hugh did not so much as pause in brushing Bucky's coat, which would already be gleaming even if it were not glowing. "He does not."

"Yes, he does."

"I try not to think about it," Hugh admitted. "Don't spoil my horse."

"He's already spoiled," Elara countered, and Hugh had no good comeback to that. He finished up quickly and led her out of the stables, which were after all a public place, and back to his room, which had for the first part of their acquaintance been kept pin-neat and now—well, it was still tidy, but there were papers everywhere, including..."Why is there a map of Canada on your bed?" Well, she thought, at least it served as a distraction from the brief thought she'd had when they'd entered the room, that he should back her up against the door and kiss her. She knew he wanted to—she could see it in his eyes sometimes, just as she suspected he could see it in hers—but both of them seemed afraid to let this be too real, and so nothing had happened between them since after the battle of Aberdine. It was frustrating in the extreme and it could only last so long, but it was where things stood at the moment. Happily, there was nothing sexy at all about a map of Canada.

Hugh had sat down at his desk and was looking for something among the stacks of papers; he said, without looking up from his search, "When I met Landon in Charlotte he was concerned about what I knew about something going on in 'the North,' which was nothing, so I bluffed him, and the idea that I might actually know something concerned him even more, which convinced me it wasn't just him bluffing me. Felix sent scouts to figure out what was going on, but 'North' is vague and they're searching blind. I have four scouts you've never met. Well. Maybe three. Mack hasn't reported in in nearly two months. She might be dead." She could see enough of his face from where she was standing to see the crease that formed between his brows at the thought of possibly having lost another of his people.

She had known about the scouts; occasionally one of them called the castle's phone to make their reports. "You could have brought them here to get properly supplied first."

"You wouldn't have been happy about me sending them back off first thing."

"If you told me it was to do reconnaissance on Nez, I wouldn't have minded," she argued, and Hugh shrugged, conceding the point. Something in the gesture reminded her suddenly that he was, in fact, French. His English was so impeccably mid-Atlantic that sometimes she forgot, but every now and then his body language, or something in his expressions, somehow gave it away.

He gave up on whatever he was looking for, turned in his chair to face her, and concluded his previous explanation with, "And the map's on the bed because Parkhurst called in this morning and we were checking some things from his report, and there's nowhere else to put it."

"I can see that," she said, and he rolled his eyes at her tone. They would have to find a room somewhere, she thought, for the leadership of the Iron Dogs to use as an office. Perhaps two rooms, one for Hugh and one for the centurions to share. Holding all their meetings in Hugh's bedroom was clearly not a workable long-term solution. They might be able to carve out a space in the barracks once every spare inch of the barracks wasn't being used to house extra Dogs. In the meantime, "You could use my study. The table's bigger."

"Thank you. No."

"I barely use it, and I won't snoop," she argued.

"Yes, you will, and other people come through there, as well. I can't very well clear out all of our business every time you need to have a meeting."

"We are married," she tried. "What's mine is yours." Hugh just looked at her. She filed it under 'problems to be solved' and let it drop, asking instead, "What did you want to talk to me about?"

He didn't beat around the bush. He just sat back in his chair like a big lounging cat and said, "We need money. And by 'we' I mean the Iron Dogs, of course."

She sighed, already frustrated. "We've been over this--"

"Yes, I sat through all the same excruciating meetings as you did, I had my chance to argue my case, and I agreed to the budget as it stands being reasonable. It doesn't change the fact that we need money that simply can't be squeezed out of the budget. I can't ask my people to live like this forever," he said, and Elara knew he couldn't know how much it mirrored her own thoughts. "Fortuitously, I have the ability to earn money: I have an army. But if we're going to start lining up work for the spring, we need to start looking for it _now_ , and that presents its own set of problems."

He was planning to leave, she thought. He'd sat through all of those meetings, worked hard to finish the alteration to the defenses, talked about the new wing of barracks, declined to divorce her, and now he was planning to pack them up and take them somewhere someone could afford to pay them. She supposed she'd brought this on herself. "How do you mean?" she asked, wanting to make him say it, at least, and Hugh sighed.

"Landon's not going to attack again any time soon, although I imagine he'll get back around to it eventually," he said. "I'm still here. We still don't know why Roland wants this land, but it's safe to bet he still wants it. But for the meantime, he's off the table. I don't have to guard the castle against him, which means I have to consider the next most likely threat, which as far as I can tell is the people who sent a magical suicide bomber to our wedding. The people your people very carefully and deliberately will tell me exactly nothing about. If I can't assess a threat, I can't determine what is necessary to deal with it, which leaves the only safe assumption to be 'everything,' meaning I will spend the summer with what's looking like it could be four hundred Iron Dogs stacked in your castle like cord wood, making no money and eating your food." Hugh spread his hands out and said, "Help me out here."

Relief swept through her and left her feeling rather silly. He didn't want to leave. He wanted to figure out how many Iron Dogs needed to stay. Elara considered her reply very carefully. "They're not going to send a mass attack on the castle," she finally said. "They don't have an army."

Hugh asked without missing a beat, "Could and would they hire one?"

"I don't know."

"Then what are they going to send? More suicide bombers?"

"I don't know." Hugh looked like he was working up a full head of steam, and she could hardly blame him. His point was a good one, and her last few answers were the opposite of helpful. "Let me speak to the others and get back to you."

"Just a number would be a start," Hugh said, and she recognized the compromise for what it was. "I would love to know more, but if I know how many soldiers I absolutely need to leave here, that's better than nothing."

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," Hugh agreed.

Elara turned to go, then turned back. "It's going to be more than four hundred, you know. Some of them have to be hunkered down somewhere waiting for spring before they try to travel."

Hugh gave her a bitter, bitter smile. She wasn't sure how old he was beyond 'older than he looked,' because he had no idea himself, but in that moment his eyes could have been a thousand years old. "That just gives Landon more time to pick them off. Of course," he said thoughtfully, almost a little hopefully, "Stoyan thinks several of his people hopped the border into Atlanta while he was on the cross, and Landon can't touch them there, so...maybe."

"If you get enough people to split off another century like I know you've been talking about, I'd like to consider putting a new barracks in the town for part of the Dogs. Their infrastructure can better absorb a few hundred more bodies than the castle, and it seems like it should make patrols and defense easier in the long run."

"I'd been wondering how to approach you about the same thing," he admitted.

"Well, that's frightening." There was a moment where they looked at each other in perfect, wry understanding, and then she said, "I'll leave you to it," and turned to go. That, she thought, could have gone much worse. They seemed to be finally learning how to work together. Horrible thought, she told herself, smiling a little, as she set off back down the stairs to attend to the next item on her agenda.

A few days later, Stoyan would get back from Lexington with the antibiotics for Jake Foster, who was still holding his own, and three more Iron Dogs he'd found along the way, and she would get to see Hugh smile again, see him take the win for what it was. It might not be much, she thought, but it wasn't nothing.


End file.
